What I'm Making on Thanksgiving

Thursday is my Super Bowl and it's almost time to take the field

Thanksgiving is, without a doubt, my favorite holiday. I love to cook. I love the chopping, the days of prep, the planning of the menu. I love waking up before everybody else to brew my coffee and preheat the oven before turning on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and eagerly anticipating the arrival of The Rockettes and, of course, Santa.

Holiday cooking for me is as much about the ritual as it is about the delicious food. But, let’s be honest, that’s a big part of it. I have been perfecting my Thanksgiving menu for decades but it has evolved year after year. There have been years where I made a lot of food, for a lot of people. Then there was the first year I spent Thanksgiving with Tom—at his then-bachelor pad in Chicago, where I made a full holiday menu from Goop using only a steak knife and a rubber spatula as my cooking tools.

The one constant is the cranberry sauce. I have not deviated from my beloved recipe for more than ten years (now that’s true love).

But I change up my turkey recipe frequently. I try out different desserts often. And while I always make stuffing, that changes, too. So this week, I’ve outlined what I’ll be making to serve on turkey day. Plus, a couple bonus, day-after recipes that I’ve made in years’ past. (This newsletter is all about what’s left, right? Might as well make use of those leftovers.)

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Here’s my day-by-day gameplan

Wednesday

Make the cranberry sauce. The Neely’s cranberry-chipotle relish is the absolute best, incredibly easy and tastes better the next day, after the flavors have time to marry overnight.

Thursday

A.M.

Prep the stuffing. You can go ahead and pre-bake and just pop it in the oven to warm right before serving dinner or you can just pre-assemble the entire thing and cook it to coincide with the turkey. (I will do the former, as my kitchen is small and I need to make use of the space). Here’s the stuffing I made last year. We loved it so much we’re doing it again.

Around 1 P.M.

Make the snacks. My go-tos are deviled eggs and baked, seasoned pretzels with brie. Deviled eggs have a long history in my family and my grandmother made the best ones. But she wasn’t too precious about her family recipe. Instead, she and I would try out new versions every year (it was almost always just she and I at holidays so we would focus on having fun with a few dishes rather than making one giant feast—one year, we added artichokes to the deviled eggs, another year, smoked salmon. And one year we went really insane and “pickled” the eggs in beet juice, which turned them purple and very festive). This year, I’m opting for an old recipe from The Smitten Kitchen’s first cookbook.

Around 2 P.M.

Start on everything else. My sides this year will be double-garlic mashed potatoes and Chrissy Tiegen’s Brussels sprouts with bleu cheese and dried cranberries, plus the cranberry-chipotle relish and that absolutely wonderful chorizo and Calabrian chile stuffing. The main event will be Ina’s Tuscan turkey roulade, which utilizes a bone-in, skin-on breast (the perfect size for our three-person meal, as it will still yield leftovers).

We usually eat around 4 P.M…. and maybe eat a second helping a few hours later.

After, we’ll do dessert. I have made just about every pumpkin/pecan/sweet potato pie known to man. This year, I am going to make Ina’s bourbon chocolate pecan pie from her new cookbook (with vanilla ice cream, of course).

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The Morning After

Last year, Thanksgiving was our final hurrah in our old home. We were moving out just a few days’ later, so I made it my mission to turn the turkey and sides into something new and exciting and eat it all over the following few days. On Black Friday, I had a really genius idea to do a breakfast burrito using chopped up turkey, a handful of the chorizo stuffing, a dollop of the spicy cranberry sauce and some cheese. I rolled it in a Siete burrito-sized tortilla and grilled it in a pan and it. Was. Excellent.

I have also made Food52’s turkey pho on many past Black Fridays. It’s delicious and doesn’t taste anything like leftovers, so it just feels like an entirely new meal.

For breakfast, it’s fun to slather your leftover cranberry sauce (even the canned kind!) on some toasted bread, top with talegio cheese and throw it in the oven briefly before topping with some lemon zest. It’s just like a nice, cheesy, slightly sweet tartine to enjoy with coffee or tea.

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If you need to set the mood in the kitchen, here’s my go-to cooking playlist.